Existing Internet Telephony Systems include systems described in:                Network Voice Protocol (NVP)—RFC 741 November 1977: Computer-to-computer real-time interactive voice communication.        Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)—RFC 2543 March 1999, RFC 3261 June 2002: Application-layer control for creating two-party, multiparty, or multicast sessions that include Internet telephone calls.        
Similarly access to web applications via an Internet browser is technology that has been in the art for many years. The last specification for HTML, the predominant web page markup language, is the HTML 4.01 Recommendation published in December 1999 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
The Java language itself has been around since June 1991. The use of client software for making telephone calls over the Internet using a general purpose terminal device or computer has also been around for some time.
Skype launched the first public beta release of their application in August 2003. Earlier audio chat applications like Yahoo and MSN Messenger already existed at that time.
Java softphones have also been around for a while. Open source Java SIP libraries dating back to April 2002 can be found on Sourceforge http://sourceforge.net/projects/jsip.
As for the concept of a Universal System within the telephony domain, babyTEL Inc., formally Voice & Data Systems Inc., introduced its Universal Messaging System (UMS) in 1991. UMS was among the first telephony systems that ubiquitously interoperated with most Telephone Switches, PBXs and Key Systems.
Social networking sites on the Internet are also well-known. Facebook is a popular social networking site where anyone can sign up for free and create a profile that is visible by other users on the site. Once a person joins Facebook they are able to look up friends, classmates, coworkers, etc and add them as friends to their profile.
There are a number of other popular social networking sites that allow users to interact with friends and colleagues. In an initiative aimed at standardization and control of the list of site-specific APIs that developers must learn, Google launched OpenSocial. It defines a common API for social applications across multiple social websites. With OpenSocial developers can create applications that access multiple social networks that support the initiative. Among the websites implementing OpenSocial are Friendster, Hi5, Linkedin, MySpace, Orkut, etc.
Social network users connect with their friends via applications developed by the social network and other 3rd parties. Examples of such applications include media sharing (photo, video, etc), instant messaging, text postings, games, email, etc.
There is a need for improvements in IP telephony platforms; namely for a Web-based phone which is transportable between computing platforms, in the methods for setting up call using the Web-based phones and in the tools used in conjunction with the Web-based phone.